


Last Holiday Weekend

by SekritOMG



Category: South Park
Genre: Gen, Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-11
Updated: 2016-01-11
Packaged: 2018-05-13 02:47:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5691709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SekritOMG/pseuds/SekritOMG
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stan just wants to watch the <i>Sherlock</i> special in peace. Wonderful art by Nhaingen inside!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Last Holiday Weekend

**Author's Note:**

> This is as close to "pre-slash" as I've ever come, I think.

There’s blood on the carpet and it gives Stanley pause. Maybe just for a moment, but for that moment he’s in shock and he can’t move, can’t breathe. The idea of going for his inhaler has just occurred to him when he hears Shelly scream and put a hand in his face, using it to leverage herself off the couch. They’d been fighting about the TV, on which Stan had been watching the _Sherlock_ special. He sees her cupping her nose, red fingertips, and it dawns on Stanley that he’s hurt her. It’s dripping straight from her face onto the rug. There’s some on the couch, some on her yoga pants. She’d just come into the room and asked if he’d put on some housewives thing, and when Stan said “no” she’d called _Sherlock_ “gay,” and Stan said “fuck you” and she’d elbowed him in the ribs and he’d said “stop it” and she’d pushed his head back to try to get the remote, and he’d tried to pause _Sherlock_ so he didn’t miss anything and then she said, “you can watch your gay little show later.” From somewhere deep inside of him the idea had bubbled up: he didn’t have to just take this. So he’d hooked her in the face and now she was running for their mother, screaming bloody murder.

“He punched me!” she’s shouting, more humiliated than in pain.

“Stanley!” Sharon gets up from the kitchen table and grabs him by the upper arm.

“She did it first,” Stan says.

“What were you thinking?” his mother demands.

He clamps his mouth shut and tries to get out of her grip, but his mother’s hold tightens and he sinks into a dining chair.

“Well?” she asks. “I’m waiting?”

Stan has had enough appointments with the social worker at their family practice to dig right into what really happened: Shelly called his show gay, and it is gay, and he didn’t like hearing her say that. Also, she was assaulting him. “She did it first,” Stan repeats, which is true.

“I don’t care if she did it first!” Sharon lets go, finally. Stan rubs the spot where she’s just let go of his arm. “You don’t hit your sister.” She grabs a glass and presses it into the ice dispenser on the fridge.

Shelly has gathered up the bottom of her T-shirt and pressed it up against her nose. It was oatmeal and now it’s brownish red, but Stan swears there’s a hint of triumph on her face.

It’s infuriating. “She does this all the time,” he starts saying, but his mother cuts him off.

“What’s the matter with you!” she spits out, dumping the ice into a dish rag. “What if you’d seriously hurt her?”

“How could I hurt her?” Stan asks. “She’s older than me.”

“You’re 14 now,” his mother says, “you’re not a little boy any more. It doesn’t matter how old you are.”

His sister, who will be 18 next month, drops her shirt and gathers the rag with ice into her hands, pressing it to her face. “Thanks, Mom.”

“Are you okay?” Sharon asks. “Do you need an Advil?”

“No,” she simpers, “I’m okay.”

This is where his resolve breaks apart: it’s not fair. It’s not fair.

“Honey, go lie down,” Sharon says, patting Shelly on the shoulder. “If it doesn’t stop bleeding we’ll have to take you to the ER.”

“I’ll be fine, I’m sure,” she says. “I’ll just go watch housewives.”

“Okay, honey, that sounds nice.” Sharon crosses her arms. “I’ll get you a fresh shirt. Leave me that one and I’ll run it under cold water.”

“There’s some stains in the carpet, too,” Shelly adds.

“Thanks,” says Sharon, “yeah, I’ll get those.”

Stan is seething. She looks him right in the eye as she walks out of the room. He stares at her as she goes. He wants to scream that she hurt him first, that she hurts him all the time, that it was an honest mistake and it’s not fair.

Instead, it comes out as, “ _Sherlock_ ’s not gay.”

“The TV show?” his mother asks.

He nods. “Yeah.”

“Oh, who cares!” she shouts. “What were you thinking?”

“I wasn’t thinking,” he says. It’s both what he knows she wants to hear, and actually true.

“You could have really hurt her” – it sounds preposterous to Stan, even as his heart is pounding. He scoffs, audibly, and his mother snaps at him, “You’re not a little boy anymore, Stanley!”

“So what does that mean?”

“It means you’re grounded!”

“But I’m watching _Sherlock_!”

“You can watch it later,” she says, “because you’re grounded for a week.”

“Don’t let her delete it,” Stan protests, “it’s not on again for ten days and it won’t stream until then!”

“Stanley,” his mother grits.

“She hit me first!”

“It doesn’t matter if she hurt you first! Gentlemen don’t hit back.”

It’s so sad to him. He pulls the strings on his hoodie and whines, “But Kyle comes home tomorrow.” It’s been over a week since they’ve seen each other. Kyle’s been gone all break. It’s been the most excruciating two weeks. Trapped in their stuffy house with his sister, eating leftover fruitcake from his grandmother for the past week, waiting and waiting for _Sherlock_ to air and then for Kyle to come back. He saw Kenny once and they walked up to Main Street to ogle toys in the store windows; they’re too old for it but Kenny wanted to find something affordable for his sister, who’s still obsessed with Barbies, or the equivalent Kenny can manage. Stan went into the city with Wendy and her parents to see Santa Claus, and it was only on the ride back that he slumped into his seat and wondered what the point had been.

To the question, “What do you want for Christmas?” Stan had only said, “I don’t know.”

“I asked for world peace,” Wendy bragged afterward. “I think it’s so selfish, asking for material possessions when so many people have so little.” Stan might have scoffed at this had he not understood her to be sincere. So he scoffed about it later, in private. Now he’s been waiting two weeks to share this information with Kyle so they can snicker about it together: “She’s so self-righteous,” Kyle would say, because he’s jealous of Stan’s friendship with Wendy and everyone can tell. He’s jealous that Wendy is genuinely good while Kyle just wants to be — really what Kyle wants is stuff, and he shouldn’t feel bad about it, because so does everybody. Stan likes that Kyle wishes he were better, though. Stan wishes he weren’t friends with such great people, because try as he might he can’t get out of this situation he’s in with his awful family and their shit and he doesn’t want to be one of them, he doesn’t want to be like them, but it’s hit or be hit, be the victim or make someone else yours.

“Be smarter next time,” his mother chides, dragging him into his room.

“I’m not smart,” Stan says, hating how it comes out hoarse like he might cry. He might, so he sits on his bed and stuffs a pillow into his mouth.

Shelly comes to the door and sticks her head in. “You got in trouble,” she says.

“Go away.”

She narrows her eyes at him. “You’re pathetic,” she says, and she leaves, slamming the door behind her. It does make him cry.

Stan spends the first weekend of the new year in his room, listening to his parents argue. It’s worst when they argue about him. “He doesn’t know his own strength,” Stan’s father posits, and Stan shudders at how it’s true but also cliché, like he’s the Iron Giant or some dog that tries to play with its owner’s new baby. It’s Randy’s new idiom for Stan, though this is the first time it’s been literally applicable. Like his father wants him to understand some kind of untapped masculinity inside of him, but Stan doesn’t yearn for that in any sense. He just wants to be regular in most ways, and exceptional in one or two — which itself is regular, the average kid with a couple of talents. He sees that in Kyle, who’s great in school but otherwise very much like everyone else. So Stan resents that Randy keeps forcing it on him, the idea that if Stan just digs down deep within himself he’ll find some kind of reserve of machismo. There’s nothing in there, he figures, though this hope is always followed by the stinging sensation in his hand from where it collided with his sister’s face. He’s heard her talking with their mother about a nose job before. “Your nose is fine” doesn’t settle her and she goes out to smoke cigarettes at the Village Inn with her friends. Shelly has exclusively applied to liberal arts colleges up and down the East Coast, because she “hates this family” and wants to escape it. Their rooms are adjacent and Stan hears her bitching about it on the phone to nearly everyone. He’s heard his parents discussing how if Shelly goes to a liberal arts college, and somehow gets a partial scholarship, there won’t be any money left for Stan.

“He can go to state school,” Randy’s mentioned, “CSU was good enough for me. He’ll be a Ram like his old man.” Stan doesn’t think of himself as a Ram but more like a lost sheep who wandered away. He’s only allowed to leave his room to use the bathroom and for meals, at which his mother silently gives him his anti-depressants and whisks his plate away as soon as he’s done. No one offers him any fruitcake. This is fine because he hesitates to admit that he actually loves fruitcake. He goes back upstairs and buries himself in the quilts.

Anyway, like always, things devolve into his parents arguing: “Don’t give me that shit about not knowing his own strength. If it were up to you he’d be some kind of hoodlum—”

“You just don’t get what it’s like for us men, Sharon” — Stan cringes and slams the door shut.

Kyle is coming home from his family trip to the Eastern Seaboard, and in preparation Stan uses Crayola Washable markers to write “HELP ME” on the back of an American history worksheet and tape it to his window. On the second floor his window is too high up for anyone in his family to spot it if they’re standing on the property, but someone over at Kyle’s house will notice.

Sitting by the window, Stan waits for Kyle to come home. He waits and he waits, his breath fogging up the glass. Lights go out in the downstairs windows and flick on in the upstairs windows across town. From his perch Stan sees all of it, every incandescent bulb coming alive, all of South Park slowly rising up together — except the Broflovskis, who aren’t home yet.

“Stanley.” Stan nearly falls over when his mother barges into the room. “Don’t sit on your desk, Stanley, what are you doing?”

“Nothing!” It comes out defensive — well, it’s true, he isn’t doing anything.

“Brush your teeth,” she says, and she briskly leaves the room.

It’s lonely until the lights go out, early, and Stan lies awake wishing for his return to school on Monday.

A rapping at the window interrupts his descent into sleep, and then Kyle is sitting on his bed, holding the sign. “I got your note,” he says. “Ike saw it. Are you okay?”

Meaning to say “yes,” Stan erupts with, “I really missed you.” He’s in his baggy boxers and the long-sleeved T-shirt he sleeps in, the ones that come in a pack of three from Target. He can tell Kyle had to sneak out because Kyle is dressed for bed, too, in his flannel pants tucked into Uggs and his parka over a gym shirt; it says PARK COUNTRY ATHLETICS proudly over Kyle’s breast and in permanent marker BROFLOVSKI has been scribbled across his stomach. The Uggs are soaked and Stan can feel it through his comforter; in the glint of light through the parted curtains he sees little bits of snow melting on the floor.

Kyle doesn’t say “I missed you, too.” He pushes Stan aside and crawls into bed with him, Uggs and all.

“What happened?” Kyle asks.

“My sister.”

“What’d she do now?”

“She kept me from finishing _Sherlock_.”

Stan’s voice is still mirthful and prepubescent, but Kyle’s cracks and it’s like music to Stan: “That bitch!”

“She was actually being kind of a bitch,” says Stan, “so I snapped and kind of … hit her.”

“You hit your sister?”

“Not intentionally!”

“How do you hit someone unintentionally?”

“She was pissing me off,” Stan says.

“Was she hassling you?” Kyle asks. “She’s such a bitch.”

“She’s fine. I don’t know my own strength.”

“Yeah,” Kyle agrees, “you don’t.” He wraps himself around Stan’s arm and buries his face in Stan’s bicep. When he looks up again Stan can make out some degree of embarrassment on Kyle’s keen features. “I’m so tired,” Kyle says, when he notices Stan staring, “that flight took forever.”

“Did you have a good New Year’s?”

“My parents made us go see the ball drop in Times Square,” Kyle explains. “It was warmer than it should have been. Not, like, hot. Coming from Florida it was like, it felt colder than it was? We should have gone from New York to Florida, not the other way around.”

“That sounds stupid.”

“It was okay. What did you do?”

“Watched stupid movies in Bebe’s basement.”

“Why do you keep saying things were stupid?”

“They were stupid,” Stan explains. “Stupid movies.”

Kyle lets go of Stan’s arm and for a moment, they’re both quiet. Kyle has this way of breathing deeply that’s fascinating to Stan; every inhale he takes is so concentrated and purposeful. It’s only now that Kyle is here and Stan can hear him breathing that Stan becomes aware of how much he missed Kyle. It’s not just that he wanted a friend to watch movies with, or someone to discuss _Sherlock_ with, or that seeing Santa Claus would have been better if it had been with Kyle and not Wendy. Wendy is fine and Stan even likes her, but when he thinks about her he doesn’t feel like he really gets what she’s all about. Lying in his little bed, less cold and a tighter squeeze now that Kyle’s in it too, Stan has a moment of realization.

“My fucking sister was jabbing me in the ribs,” Stan says, “and she called _Sherlock_ gay.”

“It’s relatively gay,” Kyle replies “I mean, the show jokes about how gay it is all the time, so maybe that’s fine.”

“Not exactly how she meant it, I don’t think.”

“She’s such a bitch.”

“I know,” Stan agrees, “she is.”

Kyle has to go home and Stan can tell he doesn’t want to. He keeps sighing and grows restless, shifting around the mattress as if to talk himself out of leaving. Eventually he stops and sits up. “I’d better get back,” he says.

“I won’t be grounded tomorrow.” Stan wants to sit up, too, but he’s so lethargic, it’s like his muscles have forgotten how to respond to his will as he’s been shut in here for, oh, 36 hours. “We can watch _Sherlock_.”

“I read all the spoilers,” Kyle brags.

“Oh no, don’t tell me.”

“I think it sounds good. We can watch it, yeah.”

Stan remembers Kyle breaking into his room when they were children, mostly to prove a point. Now he stands at the foot of Stan’s bed, still as Stan has ever seen him. There’s unspoken understanding between them as Kyle takes a deep breath and shifts his weight. The covers are still wet where his feet rested against Stan’s. “We’ll watch the special tomorrow,” Kyle says, “I’ll torrent it.”

“I think my sister deleted it,” Stan mumbles, under the sheets.

“She’s a bitch,” Kyle repeats, as if this makes it okay. He shrugs and his parka rustles. “I’m gonna go home.”

“Welcome back.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

Kyle stands there for a moment, as if he doesn’t know what to do. He shifts and hesitates and looks toward the window like he can’t quite go yet.

“I don’t want to be like them,” Stan says, and it comes out sounding slightly more pathetic than the defiant stab he’d imagined.

“You won’t be.” Rubbing his eyes, Kyle then pushes the window up and open. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Still tired, Stan climbs to the end of his bed and watches Kyle scale back down the side of the house. If Kyle were to fall — well, he’s never fallen before, so why would he now?

Come morning there will be a trail of footprints in the snow, unless it comes down just enough overnight to bury them. It’s a major plus to living in the mountains, though Stan would prefer to go live elsewhere. He doesn’t want to have to bury his tracks forever.


End file.
